Commentary Magazine

Secretary of State John Kerry returned to Geneva this week where he met again with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to discuss the ongoing effort to forge a final agreement on that country’s nuclear program. But not even the secretary of his State Department spin masters tried to represent this latest effort to cajole the Iranians into giving the Obama administration a much-needed diplomatic triumph as anything other than just one more scene in a long-running play directed by the Islamist regime. That the Iranians have the patience and the confidence to wait out the administration until it is willing to give them whatever they want is no longer in question. But as Congress prepares to consider new sanctions legislation that could strengthen the hands of Western negotiators, the spectacle of Kerry scurrying to and from Geneva, in vain attempts to convince Zarif to play nicely while Iran proceeds with building new nuclear infrastructure projects, should only reinforce their resolve to stick to their guns despite threats of a presidential veto.

While Kerry was in Geneva, the Iranian media was trumpeting the fact that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced plans to construct two new nuclear power plants in the southern province of Bushehr. The supposed moderate claimed that this shows that Iran was only interested in peaceful uses of nuclear power, but the massive investment in nuclear infrastructure for a country with some of the largest oil reserves in the world is inherently suspicious. Western intelligence agencies have already conceded that they have little confidence about their ability to detect any secret military nuclear programs hidden throughout the country. The decision to build more expensive nuclear plants at a time when the country is financially pressed demonstrates that their commitment to expanding their capability is about more than clean energy.

We can’t know exactly what the Iranians are up to in Bushehr. But the brazen nature of this effort while they continue to stall the Geneva talks speaks volumes about their belief that they can tell the Americans anything they like and still expect Kerry to keep crawling back to see them in the vain hope that next time they’ll gratify his zeal for a deal.

Indeed, by talking about the need to pick up the pace of the talks, Zarif was teasing Kerry as if he was handing a ball of yarn to a kitten. As CBS News reported his remarks:

Zarif was coy when asked if he thought the deadline could be met and what particular issues were most vexing.

“We’ll see,” he said. “All issues are hard until you resolve them and all issues are easy if you resolve them,” he said. “I believe all of them are easy anyway.”

He’s right about that in the sense that since the prelude to the weak interim deal signed in November 2013, the Obama administration’s approach to resolving issues with Iran is to simply gradually concede all points to them. That’s how Iran got Kerry to tacitly recognize their right to enrich uranium and to allow them to hold onto their stockpile of nuclear fuel that could easily be re-activated and converted to use for a weapon in a breakout scenario. That’s also how they have managed to move the position of the U.S. from President Obama’s 2012 campaign pledge to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program to today’s laughable goal of lengthening a potential breakout period.

Zarif was also coy about whether he and Kerry could come to an agreement by the time the latest deadline for the end of the talks expires in July. But since two such deadlines have come and gone without this failure prompting Obama and Kerry to issue ultimatums to the Iranians, there is no reason for Zarif to think they will behave any differently in the future. He can merely wait for them to come to him. That means he thinks he can insist on a deal that will give an international seal of approval and end of sanctions while Iran is permitted to retain the infrastructure and capability to be a threshold nuclear power. Moreover, Zarif also has figured out that the president’s real goal is not so much an acceptable nuclear deal as a new détente with Iran. Since he knows the Americans fear offending him, that gives him the power to be as obdurate as he likes without fear of any consequences.

Obama and Kerry may seek to portray such a disastrous result as the best the West could get in much the same manner as the way they claimed the interim deal was an imperfect yet acceptable bargain. But what these talks desperately need is a change in the dynamic that will wipe that Cheshire cat smile off of Zarif’s face and inject some doubt into Tehran’s calculations about America’s willingness to swallow any Iranian demand or delay. Only more sanctions legislation will do that. The Senate should proceed accordingly.

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The Senate Should Wipe the Smile From Zarif’s Face

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In 1957, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago named Eugene Parker submitted a paper to The Astrophysical Journal, the most prestigious journal in that field. In it, he predicted the existence of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles, streaming out from the sun in all directions. The idea was considered so ridiculous that two reviewers rejected the article. But the editor of the Astrophysical Journal, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, (one of the giants of 20th-century astrophysics, who would win the Nobel Prize in 1983) couldn’t find any flaws in the math, so he overrode the reviewers and published it. Within four years, the paper had been vindicated by the earliest space probes, and our understanding of the sun and its dynamics took a quantum leap forward

On Sunday, a Delta IV heavy-lift rocket took off from Cape Canaveral carrying the Parker Solar Probe (the first time a NASA mission has been named for a living person) to explore the sun and its outer atmosphere, the corona, close up. Very close up. The Parker space mission will get within 3.83 million miles of the sun’s photosphere (the “surface” that you see when you look at the sun, which you should do only with proper eye protection).

How close is that? Well, since sunlight is subject to an inverse square law, just like gravity, when you get twice as close to the sun, you are getting four times as much sunlight per unit of area. At 3.83 million miles the Parker space probe will be getting about 590 times as much sunlight per square inch as we get on earth. In other words, the sunburn you would get in one hour of a bright sunny day on the equator, you would get in about six seconds if you were 3.83 million miles from the sun. In one hour, you would be, well, long since toast.

The Parker mission will (we hope) be able to withstand such an enormous energy flux thanks to some very fancy engineering. According to Space.com, “To deal with heat, the solar-powered probe is equipped with a 7.5-foot-wide (2.3 meters), 4.5-inch-thick (11.4 centimeters) shield made of an advanced carbon-composite material, which will keep most of the spacecraft’s scientific instruments at a comfortable 85 degrees F (29 degrees C).”

The probe, at times, will accelerate to about 430,000 miles an hour over the course of its seven-year mission, by far the fastest man-made object in history. (A high-powered bullet has a muzzle velocity of about 4000 feet a second, or 2,700 miles an hour, not even one percent the speed that the Parker space mission will achieve).

If all goes well, within a decade, our knowledge of the sun will have taken another quantum leap forward.

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For some on the right who sold books, sat behind microphones, or crafted the themes that GOP candidates deployed on the campaign trail, one word dominated in the Obama era: Socialism. Today, there is no shortage of self-criticism among conservatives who engaged in that enterprise. The public sector activism endorsed by Obama and his allies was culturally progressive—not socially reactionary, as genuinely socialist regimes tend to be. The redistributionist policies the 44th president favored were leftist, but he did not endorse collectivization or nationalization as socialists do. Conservatives critical of this period’s rhetorical excesses blame themselves for breaking down the stigma once associated with unalloyed socialism.

Perhaps conservatives played a role in over-diagnosing collectivist impulses, but that alone cannot explain the Anglo-American left’s souring on center-left politics. According to Gallup polling, the collapse of faith in capitalism among rank-and-file Democrats is a recent phenomenon. Just 47 percent have a positive view of capitalism—the most successful anti-poverty program in human history—a decline of nine points since 2016, while the party’s faith in the value of socialism hovers stably around 60 percent. Unsurprisingly, that decline in support for the capitalist model is sharpest among Americans under 29-years-old, who have no living memory of the kind of socialism practiced in what we used to call the Second World.

Conservatives must not become hostage to self-doubt. They are, however, obliged to sharpen and narrow their criticisms of the collectivist philosophy at the foundations of many of today’s most popular liberal policy proposals.

For example, New York Times contributing opinion writer Bryce Covert has recently submitted a criticism of Senator Marco Rubio’s plan to expand access to paid family leave, which would allow Americans to access a portion of the money they pay into Social Security early. Covert proposed as an alternative a “tiny” new payroll tax that would preserve Social Security’s capacity to offset retirement and disability costs. This is standard liberal fare, but the ethos that buttresses her recommendation is not. Rubio’s plan, she wrote, “perpetuates the idea that child-rearing is an individual, not a collective, responsibility.” The collectivization of child-rearing and the breakdown of the “bourgeois family” so as “to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class” is straight out of the Communist Manifesto.

The Democratic Party’s newest rock star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has become a caricature of the ignorance and arrogance typical of the collectivist left. In what was perhaps just an exercise in throat clearing, she recently noted that the problem of destitution in New York City coincides with the fact that there are approximately three vacant apartments in the city for every one homeless person. Surrendering to their ill-considered impulse to boost every Democratic utterance, the fact-checking outlet PolitiFact assured its readers that Ocasio-Cortez was alluding to a feasible solution to the matter of homelessness. Leaving aside the selectivity and motivated reasoning on display here, Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal—ostensibly the seizure of private property to effect a societal reversal—mirrors Friedrich Engels’s 1872 plan to ameliorate homelessness via the “expropriation of the present owners” of property.

Political observers have been unable to ignore the Democratic Party’s recent turn away from Barack Obama’s signature health-care reform law and toward a government monopoly on health insurance. Call it Medicare-for-all or single-payer; the new affinity among Democrats for the functional nationalization of the health insurance industry speaks to a paradigm shift on the left. Likewise, establishing as a right the ability to access tuition-free education at public universities and a federal jobs guarantee—all planks of the Democratic Socialist agenda with increasingly broad appeal—are pillars of the Soviet Constitution. These policy prescriptions go quite a bit further than, say, Elizabeth Warren-style proposals to compel certain American businesses to offer their employees a stock ownership plan. That may be intrusive and statist, but it isn’t explicitly socialistic.

It wasn’t long ago that the Western liberal establishment would regard this kind of creeping reversion to the mid-century leftist mean as electoral poison. Bill Clinton once bristled with indignation over the notion that his health-care reform proposals constituted a form of collectivism. He celebrated the triumph of “freedom” in the 20th century, which he defined as the “victory” of “free enterprise over state socialism.” On April 25, 1999, Clinton hosted a roundtable discussion featuring ascendant center-left leadership from around the world. This new movement, the president boasted, included “five members of the last Politburo of the Soviet Union.”

Seated next to Clinton was British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who arguably did more to banish leftism from his party’s ranks than Clinton did in America. In 1995, Blair drove a stake through the heart of the “definitely socialistic” Clause IV of the Labour Party’s 1918 constitution, which endorsed “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” Under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, that meant the nationalization of industry—an economically stifling program that was dismantled by Margaret Thatcher. The redrafting of Clause IV was an effort to purge socialism from the Labour Party’s DNA, and it worked. At least, for a time. Today, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, a proud anachronism with disturbing attachments to terrorists and anti-Semites, advocates the restoration of the old Clause IV and, with it, “public control of the railways.”

In May, Hillary Clinton was asked if her decision to label herself a “capitalist” hurt her in the surprisingly competitive 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. “Probably,” she replied. After all, she said, “41 percent of [Iowa] Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists.” But what is the party to do? Socialism is where the activism is. It’s where the small-dollar donations are, and where the most energetic campaign volunteers’ affinities lie.

Perhaps the party’s elders think that this is no time for a lecture on the human misery, economic inefficiency, cronyism, and statist oppression that socialism begets. After all, there are elections to win. So they flatter the economically and historically illiterate in their ranks. Maybe they think they can control the monster they’re bringing back to life, but that is hubris and cowardice. The time to pump the brakes on socialism’s revival is now; before it has won a mandate at the polls. If Democrats pass on this opportunity, they will find themselves prisoners to their party’s collectivists soon enough. After all, taking captives is what socialism does best.

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Can a right-wing American writer help spark a resistance movement inside the U.K. Labour party? Probably not. But these aren’t ordinary times. There is a great danger looming inside Labour. Its shadow extends from the British Isles across the West, including the United States. That danger has a name, Jeremy Corbyn, and there is a duty to prevent his ever coming to lead Her Majesty’s Government.

The latest revelation about the Labour leader—that in 2014 he laid a wreath at the graves of several Palestinian terrorists, including the masterminds of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre—underscores the urgency of the task. As the Daily Mail reported on Friday, Corbyn was photographed honoring the burial site of members of Black September, the terror group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes in Munich.

“One picture places Mr. Corbyn close to the grave of another terrorist, Atef Bseiso, intelligence chief of the Palestine Liberation Organisation,” per the Mail. “Another image shows the Labour leader apparently joining in an Islamic prayer while by the graves.”

His Labour handlers claimed Corbyn was there to commemorate some four-dozen Palestinian militants killed in an Israeli air strike against a Tunisian PLO base. But hang on: “On a visit to the cemetery this week, the Daily Mail discovered that the monument to the air strike victims is 15 yards from where Mr. Corbyn is pictured—and in a different part of the complex. Instead, he was in front of a plaque that lies beside the graves of Black September members.”

Corbyn himself has described the conference as one “searching for peace,” but the Daily Mail on Monday debunked that apologia, as well. The gabfest—titled the “International Conference on Monitoring the Palestinian Political and Legal Situation in the Light of Israeli Aggression”—featured leading members and ideologues for the Gaza-based terror outfit Hamas. One such leader, Oussama Hamdan, offered a “four-point vision to fight against Israel” and hailed Hamas’ “great success on the military and national levels.”

This comes on top of everything else we know about Corbyn’s Labour: the unreconstructed Stalinist party spokesman, the anti-Semitic outrages from local councilors and top MPs alike, the Labour leader’s stints as a broadcaster for state-run Iranian television, his invitations to Hamas and Hezbollah, which he has called “our friends.” And on and on and on. The noxious ideological fumes wafting from a once-honorable party of the center-left are suffocating.

There was a time when conservatives, including Americans like yours truly, took a certain pleasure in Labour’s Corbynite woes. Corbyn was so extreme, the thinking went, that his hostile takeover of Labour would ensure Tory ascendance for a generation. The man’s goofy manners—his tweed jackets and bad ties, his bicycling and gardening—only added to the fun. But the joke stopped being funny long ago. The Tories under Prime Minister Theresa May are in a shambolic state, Brexit has stalled, the pound sterling is in a downward spiral, and the electorate is deeply polarized. He really could pull it off.

To avert that dreadful prospect, Britons of good will should set aside quotidian policy differences and rally around the “Never Corbyn” standard. The outcome of Brexit, taxes and welfare, immigration and the National Health Service—none of these questions is more important than ensuring that the Jew-baiting, Black September-honoring, Hamas-befriending crank from the People’s Republic of Islington gets nowhere near No. 10 Downing Street.

For the love of all that is good and just.

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On August 16, the Boston Globe will publish an editorial denouncing Donald Trump’s “dirty war on the free press.” They will not be alone. According to the Globe’s deputy editorial page editor, over 100 American newspapers ranging from major city dailies to local outlets will join with the paper in a united assault on this White House’s attacks on political media as the “enemy of the people.” The tension between media consumers and producers—regularly exacerbated by the president—has even been condemned in the United Nations. The institution’s outgoing high commissioner for human rights said that the president’s agitation verges on “incitement to violence”—a legitimate concern that justifiably haunts many of Trump’s domestic critics.

For some, the pretense of concern for civic decency and national comity melts away when those desirable conditions conflict with their team’s political imperatives. Among Donald Trump’s self-appointed phalanx in the conservative press, the fear that the president may again be creating the conditions for violence will be waved off. After all, the sources of this criticism are hardly objective, and Trump’s critics cannot be lent one inch of legitimacy lest they take a mile. But to dismiss the potential of incitement to produce anti-media violence is to be blind to the rhetoric-fueled political violence we’ve already witnessed in the Trump era. By and large, though, that violence is not the product of Trumpian incitement. Just the opposite; it appears to be the result of anti-Trump anxiety.

To mark the first anniversary of the terrible events in Charlottesville this weekend, a band of white nationalists just large enough to have gratuity included in their check descended on Washington D.C. There, they were confronted by a crowd of anti-racist demonstrators numbering in the hundreds. Between the counter-protesters, the journalists, and the police assigned to keep order, the handful of white supremacists who instigated this event quickly ceased to be of relevance. Unfortunately, the threat of civil unrest did not abate with the successful intimidation of the alt-right. The left’s more agitated elements quickly turned on the police and the press.

The anti-racist demonstrators paraded down the streets in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “All cops are racist, you better face it.” “No borders. No Wall. No USA at all,” another group of demonstrators shouted. “Last year they came w/ torches,” one of the protester’s banners read. “This year they come w/ badges.” The Washington Post reported that the demonstrators were confused and agitated by the large riot gear–clad police presence. That “confusion” led to a variety of confrontations, including one in Washington D.C. where an officer was pelted with objects and nearly torn off his motorcycle.

Police did not have it anywhere near as bad as the press. Demonstrators assaulted an NBC News reporter and tried to prevent him from filming the mass demonstration. “Fu** you, snitch ass news bitch,” yelled one demonstrator as he lunged at NBC News correspondent Cal Perry. ABC News reporter DeJuan Hoggard was confronted by protesters who were so agitated by the prospect of being filmed that they cut the audio cable on his recording equipment.

It would be ignorant to dismiss these and similar moves by potentially and actively violent left-wing organizations as the outbursts of an inchoate movement without an ethos. Anti-police violence and anti-media agitation are predicated on mature intellectual and organizing principles.

Mark Bray, a Dartmouth College historian and the author of Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street, explained that Antifa’s purpose is to “preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts.” As a movement, it “rejects the liberal notion that fascism is a school of thought worthy of open debate and consideration.” Writing in praise of Antifa’s “militant left-wing and anarchist politics,” the Nation’s Natasha Lennard mocked “civility-fetishizing” liberals who “cling to institutions.” Presumably, she meant institutions like the right of objectionable elements to peaceable assembly, or, in her words, “predictable media coverage decrying antifa militancy.” Animated by the increased visibility of white nationalism in the Trump era, Mother Jones published a less-than-condemnatory profile of the resolve of “left-wing groups” to resist white supremacy, which “sometimes goes beyond nonviolent protest—including picking up arms.”

These activists’ sentiments are not limited to the liberal fringe. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has picked up a failed liberal war on right-wing media’s credibility where the Barak Obama administration left off. The mayor has never been shy about dismissing Rupert Murdoch-owned properties like the New York Post and Fox News Channel, which he does not consider “real media outlets.” This weekend, de Blasio devoted himself to attacking these “tabloid” institutions for deliberately “increasing racial tensions” in America. In a world without these media outlets, “there would be less hate,” he said, “less appeal to racial division.” Given the political environment, you can see how this might be misconstrued as a call to action.

In the parlance of the militant activists on the streets, de Blasio is contending that these media outlets deserve to be “no-platformed.” And the mayor seems prepared to act on his exclusionary beliefs. When a credentialed Post reporter tried to approach the mayor this weekend at a public event, the mayor’s New York City Police Department security detail physically escorted the reporter out of de Blasio’s sight. As the Post correctly noted, the incident was not unlike the White House’s efforts to demonize CNN and bar its reporters from access to the White House.

The prospect of imminent violence resulting from white supremacist and anti-media fervor recklessly whipped up by the president needs to be urgently and forcefully confronted. As I and others have written, Trump’s penchant for demonizing the press and flattering his most unsavory supporters has the potential to radicalize his more unstable fans, who perhaps cannot see through the act. But the same is true for liberals. Their popular elected officials are demonizing media they don’t like, blaming them for racial tension in America and deeming them, in effect, fake news. Their left flanks are populated by ghoulish polemicists who are role-playing at violent revolutionary politics. And amid all this, the potential exists for these ingredients to yield precisely the kind of bloodshed that the press fears Trump may be inviting.

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The COMMENTARY podcast discusses the weekend of unrest that followed the one-year anniversary of white nationalist-instigated violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Despite vastly outnumbering the white nationalists who showed up to commemorate the heinous anniversary, many of the anti-racist demonstrators were not content to be peaceful. The podcast explores what animates these violent movements. Also, the podcast unpacks the increasingly serious friction between the U.S. and Turkey.

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